Research into anti-icing surfaces often conflates the
two separate
problems of ice accumulation: water adhesion and ice adhesion. The
body feathers of perpetually ice-free penguins are very good natural
examples of anti-icing surfaces, which use two different mitigation
strategies for the two disparate problems. Herein, we mimic the form
of the feather’s wire-like structure, which is decorated with
superimposed nanogrooves by laser micromachining fine woven wire cloths.
Post-processing techniques also allow us to isolate the role of surface
chemistry by creating both hydrophilic and hydrophobic versions of
the synthetic anti-icing surfaces. Our results show that water-shedding
and ice-shedding characteristics are indeed derived from different
physical functions of the hierarchical structure. The microstructure
of the woven wire cloth leads to facile interfacial cracking and therefore
extremely low ice adhesion strengths; the superimposed laser-induced
periodic surface structures with hydrophobic surface chemistry lead
to water shedding. Our work shows that by first taking a fracture
mechanics approach to designing the ice-shedding function, a robust
anti-icing surface can be engineered by separately designing the water-shedding
functions.